Teaching undergraduates using local virtual clusters

We describe five years of experience using Beowulf clusters of virtual machines in teaching and research at liberal arts colleges. Each virtual node in each undergraduate student-managed cluster is hosted on a standard classroom/laboratory machine, otherwise dedicated to general computing in support a CS curriculum. Applications highlighted include teaching purposes ranging from introductory CS to advanced projects, research efforts including classical analysis of cluster performance, map-reduce computations in social-networking research, and numerous interdisciplinary applications in natural sciences and other fields. Recent developments and next steps such as portable design and multi-level heterogeneous computing are discussed.